Janina Grabs

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Grabs

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Janina

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0000-0002-1630-5672

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Publications1 - 10 of 22

Goal-Based Private Sustainability Governance and Its Paradoxes in the Indonesian Palm Oil Sector
Grabs, Janina; Garrett, Rachael (2023)
Journal of Business Ethics
In response to stakeholder pressure, companies increasingly make ambitious forward-looking sustainability commitments. They then draw on corporate policies with varying degrees of alignment to disseminate and enforce corresponding behavioral rules among their suppliers and business partners. This goal-based turn in private sustainability governance has important implications for its likely environmental and social outcomes. Drawing on paradox theory, this article uses a case study of zero-deforestation commitments in the Indonesian palm oil sector to argue that goal-based private sustainability governance's characteristics set the stage for two types of paradoxes to emerge: performing paradoxes between environmental, social, and economic sustainability goals, and organizing paradoxes between cooperation and competition approaches. Companies' responses to these paradoxes, in turn, can explain the lack of full goal attainment and differential rates of progress between actors. These results draw our attention to the complexities hidden behind governance through goal setting in the corporate space, and raise important questions about the viability of similar strategies such as science-based targets and net-zero goals.
A chat with Janina Grabs on the New Book 'Selling Sustainability Short'
Grabs, Janina; Brown, Nick (2020)
Daily Coffee News
Governing telecouplings - Discussing evidence on company policies for reducing commodity-driven forest loss
Grabs, Janina; Levy, Samuel A.; Friis, Cecilie; et al. (2021)
Global Land Programme
Effectiveness-equity tradeoffs in enforcing exclusionary supply chain policies: Lessons from the Amazonian cattle sector
Cammelli, Federico; Levy, Samuel A.; Grabs, Janina; et al. (2022)
Journal of Cleaner Production
To address ongoing deforestation for global food commodities production, companies and governments have adopted a range of forest-focused supply chain policies. In the Brazilian Amazon, these policies take the form of market exclusion mechanisms, i.e., immediately dropping suppliers who have cleared their land after a specific cut-off date. Theory suggests that strict exclusionary policies such as these are likely to result in both negative livelihood effects and reduced effectiveness of the policy if some farmers are not able to comply. It is proposed that a more cooperative model of enforcement that uses flexible and negotiated approaches to compliance management may enable more marginal and disadvantaged farmers to achieve compliance, thereby improving both the effectiveness of supply chain policies and their equity. Through our case study of cattle in the Brazilian Amazon, we examine the degree to which a purportedly cooperative supply chain policy exhibits coercive tendencies at different tiers and the degree to which these tendencies influence effectiveness and equity outcomes of the policy. We show that, surprisingly, even cooperative models of enforcement are prone to exhibit coercive tendencies in multi-tier supply chains, leading to severe equity shortcomings. We provide recommendations and a research agenda to mitigate effectiveness-equity tradeoffs in multi-tier, forest-focused supply chain policies in the aim to improve the design, adoption, and implementation of such policies.
Profit Sharing: Towards a Just and Stable Future for Coffee Growers
Grabs, Janina; Bennett, Elizabeth A. (2021)
25: SCA Magazine
Selling sustainability short? The private governance of labor and the environment in the coffee sector
Evidensia; Grabs, Janina (2020)
Evidensia
This podcast explores the coffee sector's sustainability journey. Coffee is considered by many to be the flagship product and sector when it comes to market-driven sustainability approaches. Today about 30% of all global area under coffee production is certified and some say that we’ve reached the tipping point for making sustainable coffee the norm. But have we? The evidence on the impacts of voluntary sustainability tools is mixed. In many contexts, farmers are able to sell and earn more for their coffee but in many others they are not and price volatility, climate change and other market dynamics mean benefits from such schemes are unsure. So the key question we are discussing in this podcast is this – can the use of market-driven tools be the answer to the long-term sustainability of the coffee sector? When do these tools work, when not and what can make them more effective? To discuss this, we're joined by Janina Grabs a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich’s Environmental Policy Lab. Her extensive research on the effectiveness of private sustainability governance in the coffee sector has been widely recognized and now comes together as a compelling story in her recently published book titled “Selling Sustainability Short? The Private Governance of Labor and the Environment in the Coffee Sector”.
Private regulation, public policy, and the perils of adverse ontological selection
Grabs, Janina; Auld, Graeme; Cashore, Benjamin (2021)
Regulation & Governance
What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo‐Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem‐solving potential and its interactions with public policy.
Signaling Southern sustainability: When do actors use private or public regulatory authority to market tropical commodities?
Grabs, Janina (2021)
Journal of Environmental Management
The private regulation of agri-food value chains through sustainability standards has proliferated in recent decades, promising producers to differentiate themselves and gain preferential market access. However, in a number of producing countries, laws exist that mirror and go beyond what private labels demand. These countries have two options for placing their sustainable products in the market: signal their national system's equivalence to private schemes, or utilize the existing regulatory framework as favorable preconditions for widespread certification. In framing this choice as a collective reputation challenge, this study analyzes under which conditions states and parastatal actors opt for either approach, provides evidence of the strategies used, and draws conclusions on their respective success and on-the-ground outcomes. Using an in-depth comparative case study of the coffee sectors of Costa Rica and Colombia, the study finds that the divergence in institutional strategies can be explained by three factors: sector-specific institutional capacities; a country's place in the commodity marketplace, which determines the expected added pay-off of certification; and a country's overall international image.
How well does the implementation of corporate zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia align with aims to halt deforestation and include smallholders?
Chandra, Adelina; Garrett, Rachael; Carlson, Kimberly M.; et al. (2024)
Environmental Research Letters
In response to growing scrutiny surrounding commodity-driven deforestation, companies have introduced zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) with ambitious environmental and social targets. However, such initiatives may not effectively reduce deforestation if they are not aligned with the spatial extent of remaining forests at risk. They may also fail to avert socio-economic risks if ZDCs do not consider smallholder farmers’ needs. We assess the spatial and functional fit of ZDCs by mapping commodity-driven deforestation and socio-economic risks, and comparing them to the spatial coverage and implementation of ZDCs in the Indonesian palm oil sector. Our study finds that companies’ ZDCs often underperform in four areas: traceability, compliance support for high-risk palm oil mills, transparency, and smallholder inclusion. In 2020, only one-third of companies sourcing from their own mills, and just 6% of those sourcing from external suppliers, achieved full traceability to plantations. Comparing the reach of ZDCs adopted by downstream buyers with those adopted by mill owners located further upstream, we find that high-quality ZDCs from buyers covered 62% of forests at risk, while mill owners’ ZDCs only covered 23% of forests at risk within the mill supply base. In Kalimantan and Papua, the current and future deforestation frontiers, the forests most at risk of conversion were predominantly covered by weak ZDCs lacking in policy comprehensiveness and implementation. Additionally, we find that only 46% of independent smallholder oil palm plots are in mill supply sheds whose owners offer programs and support for independent smallholders, indicating that smallholder inclusion is a significant challenge for ZDC companies. These results highlight the lack of spatial and functional alignment between supply chain policies and their local context as a significant gap in ZDC implementation and a challenge that the EU Deforestation Regulation will face.
Additionality and Implementation Gaps in Voluntary Sustainability Standards
Dietz, Thomas; Grabs, Janina (2022)
New Political Economy
Voluntary Sustainability Standards have become a popular private governance framework for more sustainable agri-food value chains. However, recent mainstreaming efforts have increased competition between standards and driven down price premiums. This study employs a dataset of 659 Honduran coffee producers to examine whether the most widely used standards in the coffee sector (4C, Fairtrade, Fairtrade/organic, UTZ Certified and Rainforest Alliance) represent effective solutions for improving the social, environmental and economic sustainability practices of smallholder farmers under such conditions. It presents 54 farm-level indicators, compared across five standard systems, and links field results to a discussion of the strategies and governance prospects of voluntary standards. We find that no scheme has managed to grow substantially while maintaining strong additionality: commercially successful standards show little impact, while stricter schemes create high entry barriers and unresolved opportunity costs. Successful mainstreaming would require better cost coverage of sustainability improvements by value chain actors. © 2021 Informa UK Limited

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